In some instances, an administrator user may wish to copy the state of a snapshot in the file system to a virtual machine. For example, the administrator user may wish to copy the state of the snapshot in order to quickly use data associated with that state or to revert the current state of the virtual machine to a former state captured by the snapshot. However, some conventional systems enable copying the state of a snapshot by creating a new copy of the data associated with that state for the virtual machine, which could be time consuming and space inefficient. Moreover, copying the state of the snapshot will replace the entire state of the virtual machine including its “identity,” which in many cases is undesirable.